Apple may be working on some new search and highlight features for reading e-books on iPads, Patently Apple reported today.

The company filed a patent application for "creating and viewing digital note cards," according to the application published today (PDF below). The patent outlines technology for a new floating toolbar that allows users to do quick searches of text and enable highlighting and note-taking.

Users would be able to highlight text with various colors or by applying different fonts -- like strike-through font -- and add notes. In addition to text, these notes could include other media such as embedded audio, video, HTML, and hypertext.